Who's On Trial? Holocaust Libel Case Draws To Close

Hitler Apologist Sued To Defend His Reputation, Wound Up On Defensive

March 11, 2000|By Ray Moseley, Tribune Foreign Correspondent.

LONDON — Fifty-four years after a gaggle of surviving Nazi leaders was hanged at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, a legal case that is an outgrowth of that proceeding is drawing to a close in London.

On Monday, closing statements will be made in the libel trial of British historian David Irving vs. American professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Justice Charles Gray will render his verdict some days, perhaps some weeks, after that, ending a two-month, multimillion-dollar trial that has drawn world attention.

The legal issue for Gray to decide (there is no jury) is whether Lipstadt libeled Irving in her 1995 book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."

She described Irving, 62, as a partisan of Adolf Hitler who has attempted to absolve the Nazi dictator of responsibility for the systematic murder of Jews and to deny the Holocaust took place.

In a broader sense, the trial is widely seen as a showdown between the defenders of historical truth and the small body of extremists in the United States and Europe who say the Holocaust is a Jewish invention, something for which the men at Nuremberg, in their view, were not guilty.

Irving may have brought the suit but he has often seemed to be the one being sued. The defense has brought in historians to denounce his interpretation of history and has shown videos of Irving addressing neo-Nazi and other extreme-right groups to try to demonstrate the truth of Lipstadt's assertions.

The defense also has quoted what it considers racial slurs against Jews and blacks from Irving's 2 million-word diary as an indication of his mind-set. He has denied the comments have any racial connotation.

Throughout, Irving has affirmed that he never denied thousands of Jews and others died under the Nazis. But he has repeatedly denied that anyone died in gas chambers at Auschwitz, at one point calling this extermination camp a "Disneyland" created by Polish Communists to attract tourists.

For Irving to say he has not denied the Holocaust but then to deny the existence of gas chambers would seem to be a semantical point, a difference in the way the term "Holocaust" is defined. The death of millions in gas chambers is central to Holocaust history; no other explanation exists for how so many people died and, if Irving believes they did not die, then he is ipso facto denying the Holocaust--or so the defense case suggests.

In the closing days of the trial, Israel sought to bolster the defense case by releasing the long-secret memoir that Adolf Eichmann wrote in prison before he was hanged in 1962 as one of the men chiefly responsible for implementing the Final Solution.

Defense attorney Richard Rampton asked Irving whether he had read the memoir. Irving replied that he had been too busy to do so.

"Well, if you are, look for the word gaseinlage," Rampton said.

"Gaseinlage?" Irving queried.

"Yes, gassing camps," Rampton replied.

Eichmann's memoir describes watching the gassing of Jews in sealed trucks in 1942--another event Irving denies--and refers to "the genocide against Jewry."

The memoir further states that Reinhard Heydrich, chief deputy to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, told Eichmann that Hitler had ordered the extermination of Jews.

Rampton read a passage from a speech Irving gave at Calgary, Alberta, in 1991: "More people died on the back seat of Sen. Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz." This is a reference to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in Sen. Edward Kennedy's car when it went off a Massachusetts bridge in 1969.

Irving objected that the quote as read was incomplete. He said in his speeches he always spoke of "the gas chambers at Auschwitz shown to tourists."

Rampton then played a video recording of Irving's speech. It ended ". . . in the gas chambers at Auschwitz" and did not contain the phrase "shown to tourists." Rampton suggested to a clearly uncomfortable Irving that his statement was false.

In the same Alberta speech, Irving was quoted as telling his audience: "I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labor camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?

"There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very, very odd to say the least. I'm going to form an association of Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars, or the ASSHOLS."

Rampton accused Irving of "feeding the anti-Semitism in your audience by mocking the survivors and dead of the Holocaust." Irving replied he was actually "mocking the liars" who invented stories of what happened to them at the hands of the Nazis.

The court also saw video footage of a meeting in Halle, Germany, in the early 1990s at which Irving spoke and a group of skinheads gave the Nazi chant, Sieg Heil.